The Children's Blizzard (30 page)

Woodruff had already requested Greely’s permission to conduct experiments on the effect of all that ice on the temperature of the surrounding air. He would need to requisition half a dozen maximum-minimum thermometers from the government to carry out the research. All for an excellent cause. With any luck, he and young Sergeant McAdie would publish their findings in the 
Scientific 
American.

Despite the terrible cold that Sunday morning, Anna and Johann Kaufmann went to 
Gottesdienst
 (worship service) at the stark white Salem Mennonite Church. They brought their three surviving children with them, six-year-old Julius, three-year-old Jonathan, and baby Emma, whose first birthday they had celebrated two weeks before on New Year’s Eve, when they still had six children living in their house.

Maria and Johann Albrecht attended church as well. Bowed with grief, the couple looked barely bigger than their four young children. Maria sat with her hands crossed in her lap. Johann, at the age of forty-one, already had more hair in his beard than on his head. Now that their son Johann was gone, Peter at age nine was the oldest child. A thin long-faced boy with prominent ears and very dark hair, Peter looked terrified that his mother would burst into sobs in front of everyone. What a blessing that the child hadn’t gone to school with his older brother that day. How many times had Peter heard his mother repeat this?

The Graber family was also at church. The two brothers, Johann and Andreas, stared fixedly at the ground rather than meet the eyes of the congregation. They were the only ones who had gotten home safely with Mr. Cotton when their brother Peter and the four other boys wandered off into the storm. No one could understand why God had chosen to spare these two and take the other five. Or why they were unable to find a trace of the missing boys even three days after the storm.

The Salem church was full and loud with talk before the service began. The names of the missing boys passed from mouth to mouth. Their fathers had been searching, all the able-bodied men of the community had been searching for two days now, and still there was nothing but some stray tracks that vanished in the drifts. Five sets of footprints in some places; three sets of tracks in other places.

The faithful prayed long and hard in those days. The Mennonite worship service was still in progress in the waning light of afternoon when the minister stopped to make an announcement. Afterward, when members of the congregation talked about it, no one could understand or explain why he had waited so long.

The minister told the faithful that one of their members named Johann Goertz had come forward with a startling discovery. That morning before church Goertz went walking out in his field beyond the fire break he had plowed around his house as a protection against prairie fires. About forty yards from the house, just along the southwest edge of the fire break, Goertz spotted something he had never seen before. It was an arm emerging from the snow. The arm was raised in the air as if in defiance or triumph. Clutched in the motionless fist was a cloth coat. Goertz approached and brushed the snow away. Before he left for church he had uncovered five frozen corpses. He couldn’t tell who they were or what family they belonged to.

That was the minister’s announcement.

The three fathers set out immediately. The mothers went home with the children. The Goertz farm was three miles due east of the church. The men got there as quickly as they could through the deep drifts. From a long way off they could see the saplings of the timber claim, black whips bent and twisted by the wind. The land shelved up in a steady rise ahead of them, like a long smooth wave pushing against the sky but never breaking. A bleak stretch of prairie.

The section lines made it easy to calculate distance and reckon direction. The fathers knew without thinking about it that their sons had wandered nearly three miles from their schoolhouse, three miles south and east. Like every living thing caught out in the storm, the boys had drifted with the wind and then fallen.

At first, the men stopped in horror when they saw the dark patches of cloth against the snow. Johann Kaufmann cried out, “O

God, is it my fault or yours that I find my three boys frozen here like the beasts of the field?" It was terrible beyond words to pry the children off the ground.

At first it was impossible to separate the bodies, the boys had died so near each other. Johann Kaufmann had to carry his sons Johann and Elias together because the older boy died with his arms around his younger brother.

Night was falling by the time Johann returned home. Anna stood at the door with her three little blond children and stared as her husband carried the three bodies inside. The 
freundliche
 mother, small and soft-featured, who always had a smile for her children, watched without saying a word.

Johann set the rock-hard bodies on the floor next to the stove.

Anna looked at her dead sons and began to laugh. She couldn’t help herself. Her husband and her two little boys turned to her in disbelief but Anna didn’t stop. It would be days before they could get the bodies into coffins. Anna laughed.

Emma was still a baby, too young to know what was happening, but Julius and Jonathan were old enough to understand that those frozen blocks next to the stove were the dead bodies of their brothers. For the rest of their lives, the two brothers would never forget the peals of their mother’s agonized laughter.

Sunday was nearly over by the time Daniel D. Murphy got out to his haystack. He almost hadn’t bothered to bring in hay at all, there were so few animals left to feed. A bull and a team of horses were all that the blizzard had spared him. Fifteen years since Murphy had come to America from Ireland, first to work in the mines in Michigan and Montana, then to scrape together what he could and file on this ranch outside of O’Neill, Nebraska, and this was all he had left. A bull and a team of horses.

Murphy took his hired man with him to the haystack. He knew there would be a job shoveling off the snow piled up by the storm before they could even get to the hay. Cold as it was and getting dark, it was not a chore he relished.

Between the swish and crunch of shovels against snow and hay and their desultory conversation, Murphy and the hired man didn’t hear the voice at first. When it finally grew loud enough to pierce their consciousness, the two men dropped their shovels and stopped dead to listen. There it was again, a thin quaver coming from inside the haystack: “Is that you, Mr. Murphy?" The whole neighborhood had been out searching for Etta Shattuck for three days now. Why hadn’t it occurred to anyone to look in Murphy’s haystack?

Murphy and the hired man dug Etta out carefully. It was a miracle she was alive at all, after seventy-eight hours without shelter or food or water in the coldest weather ever known in Holt County. The girl murmured something about how Christ had covered her defenseless head, but Murphy urged her to be still and conserve her strength while they carried her to the house. His wife would do what she could to get the frost out of the poor girl’s arms and legs. Rubbing the frozen parts with snow was the only hope, though after three days God only knew what condition she was in.

It was too late in the day and too cold to be starting for the Western Union office in O’Neill. Murphy would go Monday morning first thing. Etta’s family in Seward must be notified. Murphy could only hope to God that she lived that long.

All day Sunday the cold streamed down into Texas and Louisiana.

Rain changed to sleet and then snow. Standing water froze. The thin uninsulated walls of houses rattled in the gale. Cold wave warnings came too late or not at all.

At the Signal Corps station in Abilene, the signal flag could not be lowered on Sunday because sleet had frozen it to the flag-pole.

Galveston on the Gulf coast got hit a few hours later. The Signal Corps observer wrote in the station journal that “the air was filled with fine drifting snow or freezing mist, which, owing to the influence of a wind of forty miles per hour, cut like drifting sand and covered everything with ice.” The temperature plunged from 62 degrees to 29 in a matter of hours. For the first time in the history of the city, milk vendors failed to deliver their goods; horse-drawn hacks and hotel buses were abandoned in the streets. “The blizzard came upon the city with remarkable suddenness and without the slightest warning from the weather bureau at Washington,” noted a local newspaper. “The bulletin ordering up signals and predicting freezing weather arrived only thirty minutes before the blizzard itself." Corpus Christi was next. The temperature dropped from 55 to a low of 16 during Sunday, and light snow fell through the day. Wind speeds could not be recorded accurately at the Signal Corps station because the cups of the anemometer were coated with ice. No cold wave warning had been received from Washington. “Much suffering was caused by the extreme and sudden change of temperature," the local observer wrote in the station’s journal, “and this service received several criticisms for failure to give warning of the expected cold wave and storm." It was raining in New Orleans late Sunday morning, but at 2:15 P.M. the wind veered suddenly from southwest to northwest and the temperature began to plummet. Eventually the temperature would fall some 35 degrees, from almost 80 before the cold wave to 45 that night.

Brownsville, at the southern tip of Texas, had its coldest weather since December 31, 1880, and January 1, 1881, with temperatures falling nearly 40 degrees in eight hours. Ice an inch thick covered trees, houses, and fences and brought the Western Union telegraph lines down. “Not much damage to crops,” the observer noted, “but cattle and people suffered greatly.” For the first time since white settlement, the Colorado River in Texas froze over with ice a foot thick.

By nightfall on Sunday, ice had downed the telegraph and telephone lines connecting Galveston to the mainland and the city remained cut off for the next twenty-four hours.

The Westphalen girls, Eda and Matilda, were not found until midday on Monday, January 16. They were lying on their faces on the snow, their frozen bodies mostly exposed. It was a mystery how scores of searchers could have combed the hills and ravines around the school and missed them lying there, plain as day, on the side of a hill on John Haun’s farm. Two miles from their home, almost due east.

The only comfort the men could bring their mother was that Eda, the older child, had wrapped her little sister Matilda in her shawl. Thirteen and eight years old.

It was a slow, sad walk back to the Westphalen place. One of the men would have to come forward and ask the girls’ widowed mother where she wanted them to set the bodies down.

General Greely, though “very much crowded with work,” as he complained to one of his many correspondents, found time in the course of that week to give Junior Professor Henry A. Hazen a thorough dressing-down for his ineptitude over the cold wave warning in the South. The general issued a severe blast on Wednesday: “It is not understood how you possibly delayed the display of this cold-wave signal until midday of Sunday when you already sent a special message that freezing temperatures would prevail that very morning, nor why, under similar circumstances, you neglected to display the cold-wave signal at Galveston.” Hazen’s delay, continued Greely, “tends to bring the service into ridicule as such a dispatch for Texas and Louisiana was evidently a saving clause and not in the interests of the people.” As a direct result of Hazen’s actions, “one of the most severe and pronounced” cold waves in a quarter century “reached the Texas coast practically unannounced." A few days later, Greely upbraided Hazen again for his “disposition toward captiousness, irascibility [and] petulance,” and warned the junior professor that in the future he must “prevent even a tendency in this direction." And with that, the blizzard and the cold wave it ushered in dropped from official Signal Corps correspondence.

News of the storm reached the major cities first. The 
Saint Paul Dispatch,
 an afternoon daily, carried reports of the blizzard on the same day it hit, and the Friday papers in New York and Chicago were full of the storm. The 
New York
 
Times
 reported on Friday that it had received word via telegrams moving east along the tracks of the Northern Pacific Railway that the worst storm in twenty years was raging in the Upper Midwest. "Very Severe in Dakota,” noted the 
Chicago Tribune
 that day.

Chicago got the news before Dakota. In Dakota itself and throughout the blizzard region there was something of a news blackout. Though the major telegraph lines connecting big cities remained intact, local telegraph lines and the few existing telephone lines were down, and trains were at a standstill. No trains and no wires meant no hard news. For the first few days after the storm, editors in Dakota and Nebraska were reduced to looking out their windows at the drifts and improvising. The initial accounts in the local dailies were whimsical, ironic, folksy—the blizzard was just another bad trick that old man winter had pulled out of his sack.

It wasn’t until Saturday that editors throughout the upper Midwest realized they had a major story on their hands. The chuckling abruptly ceased. Rivers of black boldface ran down the front pages of the papers in Omaha and Lincoln, Huron and Sioux Falls and Aberdeen. THE DIRE STORM AND ITS FRIGHTFUL RECORD. UNPRECEDENTED LOSS OF LIFE. MANY LITTLE CHILDREN PERISH WHILE ON THE WAY HOME FROM SCHOOL. In long unbroken columns the papers listed the names of the dead and missing. Every paragraph reported a fresh tragedy: Fred Eller, an Omaha cigar maker, found frozen to death within a block of his boardinghouse. Emil Gilbertson, formerly of Chicago, frozen to death eighty rods from John Murphy’s place near Hitchcock, Dakota. George F. Allen overtaken by the storm when he went out with his boy to get a load of hay, resulting in the death of the boy and the freezing of the father’s feet and arms. The story of the ultimate sacrifice that Robert Chambers made to keep his son Johnny alive and the valiant loyalty of their Newfoundland ran for days on the front page of the 
Daily Huronite,
 and eventually turned up in papers all over the country.